This weekend I drove 7 hours north to the coastal town of Arcata, to do a Fusion dance workshop with my friend and dance teacher Justin Riley. Whoa there! Now why is a tall, skinny, 61-year-old, over-intellectual writer and coach driving right across the state to spend the weekend in a dance studio with a bunch […]
Lynne Twist has always been the kind of person who looks for meaning in her life beyond her own personal needs. Her father was her big love. He was the leader of a big band orchestra. He died when she was twelve, and then the music stopped in their lives. She became very religious. As […]
I have been eating vegetables for almost sixty years now. Last year, for the first time in my life, I experimented with growing them myself. This was a new and very timid adventure for me. I bought the seeds, read the instructions on the back of the packet at least ten times, and then, with […]
Just the other day, I heard the word “inspired” in a whole new way. One of my coaching clients, who has a big bold vision to change the world in a wonderful way, was telling me he had felt blocked in his flow and so started reading other people’s work for “inspiration.” The word “inspire” […]
PRACTICES TO MOVE FROM Intention to Accomplishment My new book, Radical Brilliance describes four phases of the “Brilliance Cycle,” which combine together to become the reliable basis of a brilliant life. It references hundreds of practices we can use to move freely through the cycle. Here is an excerpt from the book: Practices that move us from […]
There are something like 7.4 billion people on this planet, give or take a few. Some are men, some are women, some are old, some are young, some are privileged with lots of money and toys, some have to get by on almost nothing, but what every single one of these 7.4 billion human beings […]
Definitely there is satisfaction from getting things done and bringing a project to completion. It is a pleasurable experience because the sense of completion releases endorphins in the brain, but please let me explain to you why the feelings of failure, shame, and regret are inevitable. One of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, […]
I was speaking with one of my coaching clients the other day. He has a big bold vision that could make a difference on a global scale, but he is also aware of the habits that hold him back. That, of course, is why he is getting coached. Just when we had hit a particularly […]
The following is an excerpt from my latest book, Radical Brilliance. Enjoy! As we move from states of awakening to states of flow, researchers suggest that we still see the secretion of serotonin, but now with increased secretion of dopamine, subjectively moving us from contentment to excitement. Dr. Fred Travis, the director of the Center for […]
My latest book, Radical Brilliance, is the fruit of my lifelong experience of feeling like a misfit. I was born to very intellectual and also very neurotic parents in London in the 1950s. The world of my childhood was scattered everywhere with books. For my first birthday, when kids today might get a stuffed animal or […]
You can get addicted to checking off boxes and completing things. This is the compulsive inability to go to bed at night until you have completed everything on your list. Getting addicted to productivity and achievement means that you run on a sense of responsibility, of impending doom if you don’t successfully operate within boundaries. […]
When I wrote my most recent book, Radical Brilliance, I conducted more than 420 interviews with the most brilliant people I could find, alive on the planet today. I was looking for common themes which they shared: habits, traits, and mindsets that were a reliable predictor of brilliance. Not all brilliant people are incredibly healthy (most […]
We just completed a Radical Brilliance Laboratory here in Nevada City (you can find out more about what that is on our events page). These one-week events are primarily about practice; there is very little lecturing, training, or question and answer time. We spend most of our time together practicing in all four quadrants of the Radical Brilliance cycle. […]
With sirens blazing, and lights flashing, the fire truck screams through the thick, black night. On the other side of town, smoke has been reported billowing out of an upper floor apartment. Jim Acosta, Bert Adams, and Skip O’Reilly have been working together as a team for thirty years. They have rescued children, old people, […]
I have written nine books. Sometimes it felt like giving birth to cement blocks. I raised two boys, very nervously. I never thought I would pull that one off. I have been married for 16 years to my lovely wife Chameli and it keeps getting better. What a blessing. What a miracle. But all of […]
My one-on-one coaching with clients, and teaching with groups, focuses mostly on supporting people to discover and express their unique message, insights, and gifts that could only flow through them and no one else. If your unique gift is not given through you in this lifetime, it means that it will never be given. Quite […]
I have talked to hundreds of brilliant people about what they eat and drink. There is no absolute conformity to their answers, but all agree we should listen to our body and eat consciously, rather than from a place of craving, or conforming to a one-size-fits-all theory. What follows are some general principles that have […]
My new book Radical Brilliance came out recently, and so I am doing interviews about it. Recently, a friend and colleague invited me to be a guest on her podcast. We talked directly on the phone together, not through my publicist. I looked at the calendar and said, “I’d love to do something in May: […]
Everybody has a head, and a face. Some people, by general consent, have extremely beautiful faces: they get put on the covers of magazines and shared freely on Facebook. Other people… not so much. Most people have two eyes, two hands, a nose, and a torso. And everybody has a personality. What I mean by […]
I am currently a member of three men’s groups. It may seem excessive, but I like it that way. One is in Marin County, about two hours from my house, and I drive there once a month. The other two are local, in the town where I live. Each of these three groups has a […]
